The Power of Feedback: 35 Principles for Turning Feedback from Others into Personal and Professional Change

CHAPTER 3

Improving Your Ability to Accept Feedback

If you are having difficulty accepting feedback from others, or if you just want to improve your ability to accept feedback, how do you go about improving and making desired changes? For most people, the answer to that question sounds something like, “I would make up my mind, set a goal, become determined, and work very hard to change.” Although having passion and energy is a great start, and being determined is certainly going to be important in making lasting changes, sometimes these are not enough. Using such a head-on, direct approach may help us change a little bit, but we often don’t get the kinds of changes we really want.

 

Companion Behaviors

In recent years, I have been interested in trying to understand how people develop a high level of competence at a particular skill or ability. Research reveals that people who become highly competent at performing a certain skill also become competent at several companion skills.¹

PRINCIPLE 14

One way of improving a skill is to improve your performance in companion skills.

After detailed research analysis, it became apparent to me that the same companion skills appear consistently in repeated studies, and companion behaviors were found to be associated with every skill studied. This breakthrough indicated that the head-on approach is only one way, and perhaps not always the best way to address the problem of change. The combination of the two skills—the desired one and a companion ...